Before I go on a crusade to write the world’s greatest defect tracking software, a project that will have to wait till after my game is done, I’d like to get some opinions on what others are doing.
What do you suggest for good bug tracking that is free? I cannot afford high-priced (or even low-priced) bug tracking software, so I’m looking to open-source. Local or web-based is fine.
I don’t really know what’s out there, so any suggestions are helpful.
Bugzilla is excellent:
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/bugzilla/
Better suited to a site-wide solution rather than a single project, but well worth looking at.
Bugzilla is what I’d end up using. I’d like a good servlet based system but I don’t know of any other than Scarab which seemed to blow goats when I tried their demo.
Wow. Didn’t figure bugzilla would get such high ratings.
I can’t stand bugzilla. too overcomplicated. plus I’ve never seen the querying facility work that well. >:(
We’ve been using Scarab(scarab.tigris.org) at work. It ain’t perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but it’ll do… Plus it has the advantage of being java.
If it’s just for you or a small team, you might consider using a simple spreadsheet. We did this quite successfully for a number of projects. You’d simply use different columns for a bug#, some assigned priority, other information like the program version the bug was reported against, its description, the date, a handle to know who should be informed once the bug has been fixed, and so on. Then you can sort that list for whatever criteria you want, print out the list, check fixed bugs, … From time to time you could backup the list (to keep a history) and remove fixed “issues”.
Very easy to setup (especially compared to bugzilla ;)) and still useful… To put if online, that is always accessible for all team members, put it into cvs or use webdav.
Well, Bugzilla is out due to the fact that I can’t get certain packages installed on my hosting provider, and I don’t feel like going the extra length to support it anyway.
Scarab - still looking into it.
sma - the key things I need is that it has to be web accessible for some of my beta users. So I can’t use a spreadsheet too easily.
I have used Bugzilla. It functions reasonably well after you get it set up… which is a huge pain.
It’s written in Perl, so trying to tweak any of it yourself is like poking a needle in your eye. Perl also explains it’s slug-like development progress.
So I tried to find an alternative in Scarab… Unfortunately seems even harder to set up than Bugzilla, because it depends on pretty much every other open source project out there. All sorts of frameworks upon frameworks. Forget about downloading a simple installer that works. Then it appears as if it is a huge chore to set it up so it works smoothly. Just trying to use the version they have set up for testing made me sick… so I gave up on it.
At least I can get Bugzilla running and it isn’t overly complex to use. At one point I was thinking of porting Bugzilla to Java so it would be understandable and maintainable. But I haven’t got time for that.
Thanks for that link, but Jira is WAY out of my price league at the moment.
[quote]Bugzilla is excellent:
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/bugzilla/
Better suited to a site-wide solution rather than a single project, but well worth looking at.
[/quote]
Bugzilla seems to be one of those “a bitch to get to grips with, but worth it’s weight in gold once you do” apps…I’m basing this on my experience in a past life (pre-games-development) in IBM’s development labs, including some painful years in application testing.
[note: I’m taking into account the kind of development we’re talking about here - small projects etc - and I nod to the people who find bugzilla useless/too much; if it’s not right for you, fair enough, but it seems great for most people] - like IDE’s, you could settle for “notepad with extra features” (and I know people who are very productive with semi-programmers’-editors that are just like that), but you gain immeasurably from using a real, dedicated IDE. Similarly, something like Bugzilla is nearly always “worth it” (although hard to measure the value/increase in productivity)
OTOH, I once spotted an unusual app working VERY well as a bug-tracking tool - CVS. My great fear with using a spreadsheet (or anything similar) [as suggested by someone else] is that you don’t necessarily see ALL the history on a certain bug - and experience has taught that you ALWAYS need to be force-fed all the comments and notes etc on a bug when you’re looking at it. Using only appends to text-files (one per bug/RFE), and then viewing the complete change-history for the file as your default view (may require a decent CVS client - haven’t had to use free CVS clients in some time, so I don’t know what they do well these days), can work beautifully.
Side-note: I’m using Bugzilla on a part-time game-project where the testers are fewer than a dozen friends and family - and it’s already less stressful than life beforehand. However, I was fortunate that a friend installed Bugzilla for me, so I cheated ;).
I’m evaluating a product called Anthill. It’s not the one most people know, the Ant build management product. I have a link for it:
The main Anthill homepage is http://anthill.vmlinuz.ca/
PHP based, seems to be decent. Will keep you posted.
Id go for bugzilla,
intuitive, simple and does the job,
let us know what you chose, and how it goes?
Larry
I’ve had success using Mantis before. It’s similar to Bugzilla, we used Mantis over bugzilla due to some e-mailing issues with Bugzilla.
Hi - in the same theme as the original post:
Does anyone know of a distributed (not sure if this is the best term) bug-tracking program. Most of the currently-available programs seem to be web- or email-apps, which is fine if you are always connected.
However (as an example), when you are at a customer site and don’t have internet access it would be nice to open a local copy of the bug database, add the bugs/requests/whatever, and then sync this to the master repository later.
This would also have the benefit of being able to review bugs while disconnected (i.e., working on the train).
Thanks,
Greg
Just to add to my previous post, another feature I’d like is some sort of programmatic access to the bug repository.
For example, it would be nice to have a top-level exception handler to catch when things really go wrong (unit-testing and all that aside, I believe it’s going to happen sooner or later), and then give the user the option to submit the “crash” data (stack trace, etc.) with a note to the company. Otherwise, they (the user) need to login to some webpage, possibly create an account, understand how the bug reporting system works, and finally submit the bug.
This could be put in some sort of unsorted repository which could be browsed and converted into bug reports.
Also, this would all you to add a “Submit Feedback…” menu item (or perhaps a small program in the program group) to make it easier to get feedback/bug reports from the customer.
The only drawback I can see is the potential for abuse, especially in more popular applications.
I’m posting this in the hopes that someone has seen something similar to this - most bug reporting/tracking systems I have seen rely completely on the web interface for bug reporting, and adding this would require a major re-architecting (I think).
Greg